The show presents an almost unknown side of Gábor Miklóssy’s art, the small, palm-sized oil paintings which he simply called „exercises”. The works dating back to the 1960’s and 1970’s were made – according to those who knew the artist (his son and his disciples) – using the paint which remained on the palette after painting.

The term exercise also refers to the musician background of the painter, who in 1935-1936, parallel to his art studies in Budapest, also visited the Music Academy. As both painter and violonist he considered exercising more than just rehersal, rather, as a generative and inspiring process.

Ideas and chance released by the subconscious, the loose brush-work, the color combinations and drawing could all be starting-points for later compositions.

Even if he stated that „art turns even chance into law” he didn’t consider his improvisations as scope, thus these exercises shouldn’t be confused with the automathic drawing of the Surrealists, even if he had many symbolic-surrealist works. The exercises are instead instruments of formal liberation and of transforming visions into images. The resulting fresh and fertile topsoil can be raised to the level of creation during the ceremonial process of painting, which paradoxally is situated between consciousness and self-hypnosis.

The exercises are accompanied by a selection from the painter’s writings and a few „great” paintings that reveal the diversity and range of Gábor Miklóssy’s thought and oeuvre.

We express our thanks to the son of the painter, Gyula Miklóssy for making this exhibition possible.

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Studies painting at the Cluj Ion Andreescu Institute for Fine Arts, between the years 1951-1957. In 1955, he marries Ilona Szűcs, herself a painter. His illustrations are published in a series of literary reviews and books. In the period 1965-1971, he is a set-painter at the Hungarian State Theatre in Cluj. In 1971, he becomes a professor at the Cluj Ion Andreescu Institute for Fine Arts, and in 1983 he is named head of the Painting Department. Together with his wife, in 1984 they move to the German Federal Republic. After a short period spent as a set-designer, he lived as a self-employed painter. He had personal exhibitions in Augsburg, Budapest, Cluj, Munich, Szentendre (here, in 1991, works by his wife deceased in 1990 were also exhibited), Wertingen.

The Quadro Gallery organizes the first retrospective exhibition of László Tóth, presenting the whole oeuvre in its richness, beginning with the early oil paintings of the 1960’s and 1970’s, through the compositions, portraits and nudes made in mixted technique, in Germany, until the late years of the artist.

Works are lent by the artistʼs estate, private collections and the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum.

In these parts of Eastern Central Europe, during a release of ideological pressure in the nineteen-sixties, surrealism appears as a possible option for figurative arts. Under these “realistic appearances” our artist hid implicit or quite overt critiques of the political regime and bitter notes on the Eastern European way of life, while the formal language drawn to abstract perspectives seems to be the most organic accessory of the message behind these works.

Beside surrealism, the artistic mindset of László Tóth was shaped by his meeting with the theatre of the absurd. Far from being surreal visions of dreamy landscapes, his paintings are fragmentary constructions of a recognizable reality, populated by human shapes and landscapes used as elements of a Lego game. László Tóth turns his meditations upon life into the formal metaphor of the makeshift, as makeshift entities still carry the traces of the original Order, without being capable of containing its reason, of recreating it or taking it further.

In his works human figures are being almost disfigured by a willingly erroneous composition, instead of anatomical elements, under the skin we seem to discover mechanical structures, as if the limbs and organs would live their own, separate life according to an absurd logic, denying any possibility for World and Being to create an organic, reasonable whole.

Speaking of the late paintings, created after 2000, the artist characterizes his entire creation: „My works enrich, with certain surrealistic elements, a very down-to-earth message matured by the duality of reason and sentiment, while they even invest it with a tragic quality.

This is why the human figure is essential for my creative art and this is why the aged face is at the center of my attention, inspiring me with its numberless layers like those of historical documents.”

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The first posthumous exhibition of works by Egon Marc Lövith (1923-2009) is part of the recovery progam announced by Quadro Gallery with the aim of promoting representative oeuvres of Transylvanian art.

This selection is meant to emphasize the many faces of Egon Marc Lövith's art (scuplture, painting, drawing) viewed through the prism of nudity. The nude appears not as a simple motive or genre: it occurs throughout the entire creation of Egon Marc Lövith, as a means for representing beauty and the human element.

The figure - both the models working for the artist or the biblical protagonists (Jesus, Job) - leaving their "social clothes" behind, are there to support the beauty of man and life. They also represent the dichotomy of man's beauty and dignity on one hand and weaknesses and fragility on the other.

One might also interpret these works as the posttraumatic response of a survivor of the Holocaust, of a person who accepts man just as he is and who tries, after all the horrors of the twentieth century to reposition the human figure in history, to place him, together with his classical and modern values, at the centre of Life.

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Tamás Todor (1989) belongs to a young generation of artists turning with great enthusiasm back to painting, perceived not only as a genre of its own but also as grounds for the conversion of the ephemeral visual world around us.

Thus, in his paintings of a fresh approach the elements of an overwhelming visual culture, the street and the realm of the virtual are brought together under the sign of the “grand art” and are linked to the tradition of painting. This is an intriguing blend of heavily loaded images making bold use of the “toughest” instruments of a painter, turning these canvases to true descendants of the painting of Goya and the surrealists and of the loose, cool attitude of a tramp.

The titles of these works designate the neighborhood, backyard areas used for dusting carpets as the main playground of Tamás Todor. This is also a location in time suggesting perhaps the favourite hideouts of one’s childhood, the manner nevertheless is far from being nostalgic or memorial: these familiar spots are turned into moonscapes only signaling life through the lack of its presence or through certain beings impossible to identify.

The same unidentifiable quality applies to the pictorial methods employed by Tamás Todor, operating between figurative and abstract, between the illusion of perspective and the surface of the canvas, between image and narrative. Within this unidentifiable space, his painting discovers its very own playground.

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"The confusion of the symbolism emerging from the environment and which loses its meanings. I don’t want to save my soul by means of symbolism. Symbols surface in these geometries and I can tell they are actually physical properties. And they acquired their symbolic meaning later, through use." Laurențiu Ruță-Fulger

The Quadro Gallery exhibition will present objects, installations, videos, photograms from the years 1976 - 2014, grouped around the process of conversion, specific to Laurentiu Ruță-Fulger’s work.

By conversion the artist experiences the transformation of forms, their transgression from plane to space, from identical to non-identical. He seeks for a precursory condition of forms, prior to their symbolic connotations, saying that he is "looking for a certain genesis of things".

Laurențiu RUȚĂ-FULGER (1955, Biled, Timis county) is a representative artist of neo-avant-garde tendencies in Romania. Essential for his artistic formation were the impulses he received during the 1970’s in the ambience of Sigma group in Timișoara, an environment that influenced his later artistic research orientation correlated with science. As a synthesis of these preoccupations he came to the realization of the Convertible Sphere in 1976, whose principle of self transformation marks his artistic thinking. In the 1980’s he has the same concerns, while working in the innovative atmosphere of the Atelier 35 (Studio 35) in Cluj, experimenting with new ways of artistic expression (performance, installation, photograms) of his research.

The exhibition is accompanied by a "Workbook", giving a closer look into the artist's work.

Project as part of the Quadro Grant program, with the support of Mr. Georg Lecca.